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“I hate it.”

I looked over at the woman, the one wearing a fur hat even though it was July and July was usually hot in northern Michigan. No, it wasn’t dripping like a greenhouse or burning like the interior of a volcano, but you definitely didn’t need anything like fur to keep you cozy.

“It’s not bad,” the man with her countered. He wore a larger version of that same hat so that they were twinning, but it didn’t work as well for him. She looked cute in a very weather-inappropriate way. Her hat perched up there jauntily and she kept her head steady, like a queen, so that it didn’t move. But he’d already had to adjust his own several times, and we’d hardly covered much distance. He also looked uncomfortable and hot as it slid around on top of his dark blonde hair, and watching him had reminded me of someone trying to balance a bowling ball on his skull.

Not a lot of people would attempt that activity, but you could imagine. And yet, he still looked extremely handsome, even with all that going against him. I could appreciate his appearance despite the fact that I hadn’t been overwhelmed by his personality. When they had shown up at the leasing office, he had refused to speak, leaving all communication to her (and she had been downright rude). But in terms of looks, yes, he was set: tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, and all-over appealing. It wasn’t for nothing that he’d had so many endorsement deals for so many different products, from razors to phones to mattresses to underwear.

And by the way? That underwear commercial was really something if you paused it at the right places. Stunning.

He’d even had a part in a movie that had come out the summer before. I’d gone to see it, but the theater had been mostly empty besides me, and the reviews for his acting hadn’t been too flattering. I’d enjoyed it a lot but I did acknowledge that my standards were low. The popcorn had tasted great and there was air conditioning, so I’d been very happy with my afternoon.

“This would only be temporary for us,” he continued to tell her, and she sniffed. “Let’s look at it while we’re both here. You’re going home soon.”

“But then I’ll have to come back. We’ll have to live here,” she said. “For the whole season!” Her voice had risen to a slight whine, but she self-corrected as he frowned in her direction. “All right. I’ll go in,” she told him in a normal voice, but she also stuck out her lower lip and pouted in a way that was really attractive, although it should have been childish and dumb. If I’d tried that look, it probably would have seemed as if I’d gotten hit in the mouth or stung by a bee, or someone would have wondered aloud why I was acting like a baby. He didn’t voice that question and neither did I.

She smoothed her hair, a thick, light brown curtain, to make sure that it hung sleekly over her shoulders, and then she seemed to notice that the sulky stuff wasn’t going over well, either. So she slowly tugged her lips into a smile as she looked up at him through her eyelashes. “I’ll do it for you, big boy. I’ll do anything you want,” she said softly, and he lost the frown.

I thought that I could really learn a lot from this woman. That had been so well done, just like watching a quarterback on the football field. Those guys went through their progressions, quickly checking the eligible receivers and looking for a play that would gain yardage (or not lose it). Similarly, she had cycled through her emotional repertoire until she’d found a play that gained positive attention from him. She obviously had him wrapped around her finger (and she had such a good manicure).

Who wouldn’t have fallen for that shiny hair, those big brown eyes, and her pretty pout? Also, her body…good grief. If there was any flaw, I couldn’t see it—and I would have been able to, because she was clothed in a tight bodysuit that went down to her ankles, below which she wore fur boots that matched the hat. There was no way to miss anything about her figure, and I thought it was perfect. He must have agreed, although he wasn’t actually drooling like the maintenance guy we’d walked past in the parking lot. Someone could have drowned in the puddle that had dripped out of Oren’s mouth as he’d watched her sway across the asphalt.

Anyway, it seemed like they were ready to go inside, so I walked up the steps to the front door and punched in the code to unlock it. “This is a four-bedroom unit, one of our largest,” I intoned. “It also has a basement that’s the perfect space to set up a gym. That’s what some of the other Woodsmen players have done in the past when they’ve been with us.” The keypad made an angry sound, letting me know that the code I’d entered hadn’t worked. I tried again. “Lots of guys from the team have lived here because it’s such a great location.” No, it still wasn’t working. “We’re close to the stadium, and the practice facility isn’t too far from—”

“Can we go in or what?” the woman asked. She tapped the toe of her fur boot impatiently.

“Um, yeah, I’m just…just a second.” No, the door code wasn’t functioning but fortunately for me, there was a trick to all these locks. Once I’d pushed the little button under the keypad and jiggled the handle, it finally beeped happily and I heard the bolt slide back. “Please, after you,” I said. There was hardly any space on the small stoop so I descended to the path and watched them enter in front of me.

It really was a nice place. Kind of weird, because the windows all looked out in different directions in a way that made me feel a little disoriented, but the finishes were totally modern and new. They were also expensive, which I was aware of because I’d seen the invoices. After the former tenant had moved out, it had been totally revamped from the ceilings down. They’d had to start high since he’d installed all kinds of extra ductwork that hung everywhere, and because of that, he had forfeited his security deposit. Of course, that tenant had been a professional football player so I was pretty sure that he hadn’t been overly worried about losing the money.

And the guy in the fur hat was a football player, too. The terms of his new contract were public knowledge and so were estimates of his income from his many endorsements. I was aware that he was doing extremely well for himself, making more in a season than I could imagine having in my entire lifetime.

I watched him and his girlfriend explore—at least, she did, but he mostly stared at his phone. All of the rooms were decorated because we used this as a model unit, and I thought it was gorgeous. Her lip curled as if she didn’t agree.

“Would you like to see the downstairs suite?” I suggested, and now she made a slight movement with her chin which didn’t dislodge the hat and which I assumed signaled her assent. I led the way to the bedroom with its high ceilings, ample square footage, and great closets, all of which I pointed out. But she sniffed a little as she looked around.

“This is so small,” she muttered as she continued her gliding queen walk into the adjoining bathroom. She looked at her reflection in the mirrors which covered the wall above the sinks, and her lower lip came back out. “The lighting is terrible. This whole place is small and terrible, everything about this stupid town.”

I thought I understood what she was talking about. She was from California, or that was where they’d been living no matter their original roots, because he had been playing for the Seals. In comparison to what I imagined her life was like out there…actually, no. Northern Michigan couldn’t compare to a place like that at all. There weren’t billion-dollar houses here, or at least there weren’t too many of them. There weren’t streets lined with fancy stores and restaurants whose menus didn’t list the prices because if you had to ask, well, you sucked. We certainly didn’t have bunches of famous people running around so that you could bump into them wherever you went and feel important by osmosis.

Except, we did have the Woodsmen. We had our professional football organization that was basically the heart of this whole area; my own heart was probably orange, the team’s primary color. Right now, it was very close to the Woodsmen Fan Day, when they opened the big stadium and we were allowed to tour it, to meet all the players, and to see the cheerleaders perform. It was, by far, the biggest event of the summer around here. I looked forward to it every year.

Fan Day was why these two people had flown in on a private jet late last night, after a party they’d had to attend in New York. I’d heard a lot about that because supposedly, the dry air of the plane had given the woman chapped lips and ruined her cuticles. I didn’t see evidence of either problem, but she was very concerned. Anyway, he’d had to show up because he was going to be introduced to the community as a starting player for the Woodsmen, the Pride of the Peninsulas. He would take over at tight end from one of the guys who had been amazing for years but who had retired after the previous season.

We’d had several veterans hang up their cleats and the offensive coordinator had gone to another team after accepting an offer to be the head coach, and I was going to miss them all. It felt like they were part of my family, more than just people I watched on TV, then watched on recordings on that TV, then read about on my phone, then searched for more information about on my phone and the laptop at work and read that, too.

“What do you think?”

The woman and I both turned to the newest Woodsmen. Tyler Hennessy stood in the doorway of the bedroom, legs planted, arms crossed, chin up. Maybe it was only to keep his hat steady, but I had to give him credit, too. It was a great pose. He looked strong, confident, and gorgeous.

His girlfriend also thought so, because she ogled him up and down and as her eyes assessed, the tip of her tongue snuck out and licked across her top lip. I couldn’t tell how she’d done it without disturbing the gloss there, but it was another move to learn from. I would definitely try to replicate it in my mirror when I got home, I decided.

“I think I like what I see,” she drawled, her voice throaty. I watched her glide across the just-like-wood floor (it wasn’t real wood, but I thought it looked great) and further decided that I should practice her walk, too. She was at least four or five inches taller than my five-six, and that height made her so regally sexy —I didn’t think I could pull it off. Her head was steady as she swung her hips, twitched her butt, and made her breasts…

Oh. She’d pressed those breasts against him and from my spot across the room, I heard her whisper, “Hi, big boy. What do you think we’ll do in this bedroom?” She slid her hands up his chest and again, I admired her nails. I’d never seen anyone’s look so good painted in Woodsmen orange. She ran one along the cut edge of his jaw.

In old novels, I’d read about “smoldering looks.” Well, this was the day that I saw one, a real one. He gazed down and watched her rubbing herself on his body, and his eyes were enough to set her on fire!

Oh. He’d lowered his head and now they were kissing, they were really kissing. It wasn’t just lips and tongue but also groping, also moaning, also grinding. Hats be damned—those tumbled to the floor as he gripped her butt in his two big hands and lifted her with his strong arms. I watched his fingers massage and thought that those must be strong, too. She clearly worked out a lot and her glutes were probably like iron, but he was really digging in.

She tore away from his mouth with a gasp. “There’s a bed,” I heard her say.

I cleared my throat, loudly. “Ok, this is…” This scene was hotter than a fur hat in July and also so embarrassing that I thought I might catch on fire myself. I needed to smother it. “Ok, I can go…” I tried again, but neither of them paid a whit of attention. They were kissing more and she pumped against him as if they were actually having sex, like that contoured bodysuit wasn’t even there and neither were his leather pants. “Excuse me?” I said, but they still didn’t respond.

And they were blocking the door, the only way out. Or maybe…I looked at the window above the bed she’d mentioned, considering if I could make an exit that way. But this room faced the back instead of the parking lot, and I knew that there was a drop-off. Plus, I was terrible at removing and replacing the screens in these units.

“Harder,” she moaned, and then grunted as he held her hips even more tightly to his crotch.

They were going to be naked momentarily and…ok, I had another idea, and I scrolled through my phone until I found the app. A moment later, a shrill, intermittent whistle blasted through the condo.

“That’s the fire alarm,” I yelled over the sound, and thank God that I was able to run the test cycle on the system from my phone. There weren’t too many other tenants in this particular building to get mad about it, and I could give them some of our logo t-shirts to compensate if I got any complaints. Everybody liked free stuff.

They had broken apart and Tyler Hennessy had put her down when the noise started. He looked flushed, maybe due to something besides the July temperature and his wintery outfit. She looked extremely pleased with herself and her hair hadn’t gotten mussed at all. How?

“We’d better evacuate, just in case,” I announced, and he grabbed their hats before they headed for the front door. I followed and as I arrived there, I deactivated the test cycle so that the screeching beeps stopped. They had served their purpose.

“False alarm,” I said. I slammed the door behind myself, because this tour was over.

“Does that happen a lot?” he asked. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to me, and I hadn’t thought that he’d even noticed I was with them.

“No, almost never,” I answered truthfully. Equally truthfully, I mentioned, “I’m glad that there isn’t a real fire.” And then less honestly, I added, “Who knows why these things act up?”

“Tyler,” she stated imperiously, queen-style, and he walked over and got into position next to her. I’d seen this happen several times already during our appointment. She fixed his hat and then they both smiled as she held up her phone. They were perfect together.

But she looked at the picture she’d taken and frowned. “I’ll use the one I got when we were waiting so long for her to open the door.”

“Would you like to follow me back to the leasing office?” I suggested. “We can discuss—”

The two of them were already walking away. They went directly over to the bright yellow SUV he must have rented and then they were gone, pulling slowly out of the parking lot.

It had been an interesting appointment. That was what I said to the other woman in the office, my boss, when I came back in. “It was interesting, but I don’t think he’s going to take it,” I told her. “She thinks the bathroom is too small.”

“Really? It’s bigger than my first apartment,” Iva said, laughing.

It was almost bigger than my current home, so I nodded.

“I was looking at all her social media,” my boss continued. She showed me her phone, and there was the girl with the fur hat. Except, in this picture, she wore a raspberry-pink bikini and her head was bare. She lay on her back in a really difficult position to maintain: up on her elbows, chest forward, chin tilted, lips parted, eyes half-closed, knees bent and splayed, right hand holding her right breast and the left one dipping down into her bikini bottom. I’d already seen that shot when I’d looked her up, after I’d read about the team signing Hennessy, and I’d tried to replicate it. I had given myself a charley horse in my calf.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “She’s even prettier in person.”

Iva nodded. “Look how many followers she has.” She moved her thumb, flicking through more sexy images. “She got famous by posting videos of herself wearing wet t-shirts and holding her breath for as long as she could. It took forever before she passed out,” she said admiringly. “She could dive for pearls, for sure. Then she met Tyler Hennessy and now she’s everywhere. How did he act on the tour?” she asked, her voice now very, very casual.

Yes, several of the Woodsmen football players had leased from us in the past, but we always tried to act as if we weren’t that concerned with them and didn’t care what they did. It was absolutely false because we were hugely interested, at all times. The two of us tracked every one of their movements from the window in this office, where we could see the parking lot, the main entrance and exit to the complex, and also the dumpsters where they had to take out their trash. We commented to each other on what they were doing, but we always did it in a way that feigned nonchalance (e.g., “There goes Robby Baines, hm, that’s a big bag this week”), as if we didn’t actually care in the least.

So I answered the same way. “He seems fine,” I said, totally disinterested, and she shrugged one shoulder because she sure didn’t care, either. “He only spoke to me once, so she was the one asking the questions.”

“Shay Galton,” Iva filled in. “That’s her name. They’ve been together for seven and a half months.”

I already knew those things, of course, because I knew everything about the Woodsmen team, and Tyler Hennessy was now a part of it. “She didn’t like the kitchen or the bedroom, either.”

My boss waved her hand dismissively. “It’s not like she’d live here forever. He only needs a place for the season.”

The deal he’d signed was for four years with an option for more, but it was true that anything could happen. He could get injured or released. Maybe he would even retire, although that didn’t make much sense. Hennessy was only twenty-six and he probably had a lot of years of football ahead of him. But many of the guys on the team weren’t permanently in Michigan. They went off to warmer climates after the last game of the year, to live in places where there were better facilities to train and also had more of the California vibe that I’d been thinking about. So if she did stay here with her “big boy,” it might only have been for a few months during the football season.

I thought back to their tour, especially when I’d watched him walk up the steps in front of me. “His pants…”

“Were they painted on?” Iva burst out, forgetting to be blasé. “Damn, I could see everything! His balls, even!”

I dropped the act, too. “There’s no way that either of them had on underwear,” I agreed, and turned to the juicy part. “They started to make out. It was really hot.”

“Wow,” she breathed, eyes big, and I nodded.

“She said they could use the bed.”

“Like hell they could! Our bed?”

I didn’t think they’d cared about the ownership.

“On sheets in a model home…who knows where that stuff has been or what already happened there?” she asked, nose wrinkled. “It’s so unsanitary.” Iva liked things neat and clean.

I didn’t think that had been a concern for the couple either, but I nodded again because I agreed that it was pretty gross, especially since they’d had an audience. Me. “Anyway, that’s only an air mattress, and it needs to be reinflated,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t have been very comfortable for sex.” But would they have noticed? He’d looked at his girlfriend like he wanted to devour her, and would a squishy bed have stopped him? I shivered internally, imagining if someone looked at me like that. I could use the tip of my tongue to lick over my top lip…

“Why did the fire alarm go off?” Iva asked. “I heard it start but it stopped pretty quick.”

I went to my desk and picked up the phone, pretending to check messages so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. Setting off the alarm was probably something my boss would have frowned on, and not something I needed to explain. “I’ll talk to the company rep,” I said, which was vague enough to suggest that I could have been looking for an answer as to why it had happened.

“Great, thanks. Can you also talk to Oren? I saw him standing next to the dumpster for at least ten minutes, staring at something, and now he’s disappeared. We’re supposed to get a bad storm and I want him to make sure that the drain on the east end of the parking lot is clear of debris.” She waggled the walkie-talkie on her desk. “He forgot this again. It’s too hot and I’m too pregnant to chase him down. If you go now, you’ll miss the bottled water delivery, too.”

I did want to avoid that. Also, she was very pregnant and it really was hot, so I trooped back out into the parking lot. The dark asphalt, freshly repaved, shimmered with the heat of the day and I was glad that I wasn’t wearing a fur hat. I never could have carried off either of those outfits in the way that Tyler Hennessy and Shay Galton had, for one thing because I would have gotten a rash due to chafing and for another, because I felt way too naked without underwear. It was a necessary part of my day.

I walked around the property, my hand up to block the summer sun from my eyes, and eventually I did find Oren. All of the units here had full-sized washers and dryers, but we also had a separate laundry facility, and that was where he was. I opened the door and saw that his back was to me, and he’d started a machine so that it was vibrating. His pants were down and he stood pressed against it…

I walked back out, now with my hand covering my eyes. I hadn’t needed to see any of that; why was it sex day at the condo complex? Sweet Jesus!

“Oren!” I yelled as loud as I could, and then picked up a clod of dirt from a nearby flower bed and flung it at the wall of the laundry building. It made a satisfying thump and a less satisfying mark, but he was going to have to deal with that. After all, his masturbation had led to it. “Oren!”

He opened the door and put out only his head, so the lower part of his body wasn’t visible. I was so very glad for that.

“You forgot your walkie-talkie and Iva would like you to check the storm drain on the east side of the parking lot,” I said, still shielding my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at him. I thought I might not be able to, ever again, not unless I could shake the thought of him humping the dryer. I’d seen his boxers, which were stained and also covered in cartoon bunnies, and somehow those things made it all a lot worse.

It was enough for me for the day, but I couldn’t leave yet. I had spent the morning doing homework and focusing on my secondary sales job, so I still had a list of tasks to accomplish. I whipped through those and then there were some tenant problems to deal with, things that Iva had mostly handled before. Now that she was so pregnant and hot, she just didn’t have the patience and I had taken over. I returned the call of the woman who insisted that the fan in her bathroom was too loud—she had bought a decibel meter and kept telling me, “I could have permanent damage. Permanent damage to my hearing !”

Well, I certainly might too, after she’d yelled like that. I promised to have maintenance come look at it, which meant that Oren would be in her home. I hoped she wasn’t running the dryer when he showed up. When I finally got off the phone, Iva said she was done with sitting in our overheated office. She stood, stretched, and wearily waved at me before heading out to put up her feet and work from her living room. I promised that I’d hold down the fort here.

So next, I talked to a guy who claimed that someone had been in his apartment and no, nothing was stolen, but someone had touched his plants! Then there was the man who had a leak under his sink, and how had he dealt with it? Band-aids. He’d wrapped several stick-on adhesives around his pipe to stop the water. It was no surprise to me, but it did seem to really shock him that his solution hadn’t been effective.

“The box says that they’re waterproof,” he explained. “What went wrong?” It wasn’t worth the time it would have taken to explain, so I lied and claimed I couldn’t understand it either. Again, I scheduled Oren. I moved on to email a man who was concerned that the electricity wasn’t working, but the attached picture demonstrated that only one of the recessed cans in his kitchen ceiling wasn’t on. I was fairly certain that the problem was a bulb that had burned out, but again, Oren—

The door to the leasing office opened abruptly, letting in a whole lot of blinding light. Our office got brighter and hotter as the sun came off its peak in the sky and its rays angled directly at our door and singular window. Its slant now meant that I was temporarily blinded and could only see the outline of a figure, but I could tell that it was a tall, strong man. When he said hello, I recognized his voice.

Tyler Hennessy had returned.

I stood up and tucked my dark hair behind my ears. “Mr. Hennessy,” I said. “Hi.”

“My girlfriend lost something here,” he announced. He had ditched the hat and now wore a t-shirt with his leather pants instead of the fitted, matching jacket he’d had on earlier.

“What did she lose?” I asked.

“An earring,” he told me. “I want to find it.”

“Oh,” I said, and nodded, thinking of how her hat had been knocked off during their vigorous kissing. It would have been easy to lose an earring at that moment. “Sure, we should go look.”

He let the door close as I stood and gathered my things. It was late enough in the day that the office had quieted down, and I figured that I could bring my purse and lock up for the night. Calls from residents that came in after-hours went straight to my voicemail and I faced them the next day unless there was an emergency, in which case the greeting I’d recorded instructed them to call my cell. The last emergency had been three nights ago at two a.m., when a woman had sobbed into my ear that she couldn’t find her credit card and she needed my help. At that moment.

Tyler Hennessy followed me across the parking lot, walking behind as he had done when his girlfriend had been with us. “What does the earring look like?” I asked over my shoulder as I scanned the asphalt for anything that resembled jewelry.

“It’s a diamond, about six carats, Asscher-cut, in a platinum setting.”

I didn’t know what the ass thing was, but I was aware that six carats was big. Very. I wore my mother’s engagement ring on my right hand and that held a diamond that weighed a quarter of a carat, set in gold. I tried to imagine something twenty-four times that size hanging from each of my ears. I knew that my local pawn shop didn’t really value diamonds very much, because I’d had to discuss selling my mom’s ring and they weren’t going to give me crap for it. But the earring we were looking for? It had to be worth a lot.

“We better find it,” I said.

“Shay doesn’t care.”

I stopped.“What?”

“My girlfriend Shay doesn’t care,” he repeated, and I had heard him but hadn’t really understood. “I saw that it was missing when I took her to her flight, but she said she could just get another one.”

He seemed angry about that response—as I would have been, too, because it was bananas! If I dropped a nickel, I stopped to get it. A six-carat diamond, cut in an ass shape? Yeah, I would have been looking.

Tyler Hennessy had moved ahead of me and I hurried to catch up, but he went quickly. Weather came up quickly here, too, and above us, clouds were gathering in the west. The rising wind stirred his hair and ruffled his t-shirt, which was fitted—tight, just like his pants. He wasn’t built like the defensive linemen who had lived here recently, Baines and Hatcher, and he wasn’t like the running back, Cisco, or the kicker, Diabaté. Tight ends like Hennessy were kind of in the middle. They weren’t big-boned, heavy-weight giants; they weren’t muscle-bound, short guys; they weren’t svelte and lithe. They were big and strong to break through the defense when they carried the ball, agile and fast to run routes to catch it, and tall and broad to block for other guys when they had it instead. And in my humble opinion, they looked very, very good. This tight end sure did. His new Woodsmen bio put him at six-six, which I could easily believe, and two-fifty, which also seemed about right. He seemed exactly right.

“Are you looking?”

“Huh?” I tore my eyes away from his body as he turned to stare at me, because I had been. I had been looking hard…

“Oh, you mean for the earring? Yes, I’m looking, yes, definitely. I want to find it,” I swore. I made those statements true by putting my eyes to the ground and practically boring a hole in it with the force of my penetrating gaze. How hard could it have been to find a giant diamond?

“I don’t think it’s out here, anyway,” he mentioned. “I remember seeing it when we were in the bedroom, and she said that she realized it was gone when she looked at the picture she’d taken on the steps as we left.”

“She didn’t want to mention it then, so we could have tried to find it?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. I kept my eyes on the ground anyway, just in case, until we arrived at the condo.

Once again, I struggled with the lock on the front door. “I’ll get this fixed, if you decide to rent from us,” I mentioned. We eventually gained entrance and we split off to search.

“She didn’t go upstairs,” I reminded him when he came back down. He moved lightly and in a way that was very controlled. Like a tiger, I thought. I could practice that, too—there was a whole lot I would go over tonight.

“Why are you on the floor?”

“It’s a trick I learned in gym class,” I said. “Whenever anyone lost anything, like a tooth or something else small, our teacher had us get down and put our cheeks on the ground, to look in a parallel way across the surface. You can find a lot of things, mostly dirt and bits of crud, but maybe six-carat diamonds.”

“I wanted to see the upstairs since I missed it before, on your tour,” he mentioned.

That hadn’t been my fault, but I didn’t remind him that the reason he’d missed it was due to his tongue in his girlfriend’s mouth, his hands gripping her butt, and his crotch pressed into the V of her unitard-covered legs. “Those are good-sized bedrooms, and isn’t it a great feature that each has its own bath?” I nodded to answer myself since he hadn’t bothered to. “Will you have a lot of family visiting?”

He walked across to the main bedroom. Ok, fine, we could go back to the non-verbal routine, but I’d thought that he’d decided to act more like a human. Excuse me for my mistake, big boy, I wanted to call, but instead I bent to examine the floor again before joining him in the other room.

He was standing in the walk-in shower. “She didn’t go in there, either,” I said.

“I wanted to check if I fit under the shower head.”

“Oh, we had them all raised when the Woodsmen started leasing here,” I told him. It had been costly, because we’d had to redo both the plumbing and a lot of tile to make it work. “All the other guys have fit, even the really big ones.”

“I’m big.” He sounded offended.

“I meant that they were bulky,” I said carefully. “I’ll look around the bedroom.” If that earring was anywhere, it would have been near the door where they’d been mauling each other. I resumed the position on my knees and bent down. This floor was a lot grimier than I would have expected because we paid plenty to a cleaning service that was supposed to keep it nice, and there was a lot of crud to look past.

We searched everywhere, all through the whole condo. Then we looked again, then again. Both of us put our cheeks on the floor, but we encountered nothing but dirt. I also put my hand into the drain to feel around the garbage disposal in the kitchen, and I pulled up the stoppers in the bathroom sinks to look down there. We searched all kinds of places that it couldn’t have been, like in the pantry cupboards that they hadn’t opened, through the upstairs where she hadn’t walked, out on the little back patio neither of them had noticed, and around the water heater that they hadn’t inspected. Renters never did, and that was why they were surprised by the suddenly cold showers they got. The water heaters in our complex were undersized and old.

Anyway, the diamond couldn’t have been there and we didn’t find it. And I needed to get home. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ll come back tomorrow and look again.”

I saw him mouth something, probably a swear word, but he didn’t answer me out loud. I followed his path toward the front door, which he opened, but then he stopped. A grey curtain of rain fell heavily onto the stoop outside it.

“Good grief, it’s pouring,” I said conversationally. “We’re going to get soaked on our way back.”

He turned to look at me. “Can you run?”

Could I run? “Yes, I’ve always found that my legs and lungs function just fine.”

His hazel eyes widened slightly. “Shay won’t run,” he mentioned. “She won’t get wet, either.”

Bathing must have been a real dilemma for her, then. “Go ahead so I can lock up,” I told him, and he did exit. I stepped out too and shut the door, getting immediately drenched before I’d even finished jamming in the key code with my thumb. But when I turned to leave, he was still standing there. Then he jogged next to me back to the parking lot, although I knew from watching his performance on the gridiron how fast he could run. I glanced over as we went, but his gaze was straight ahead.

I split off to go to my car and jumped inside, and I saw him get into the yellow SUV. I waited for a moment, watching through the rain, but he was very slow to back out. I left first and as I did, I noticed that the drain on the east side of the lot hadn’t been cleared and was overflowing. Iva was going to be pissed at Oren tomorrow.

I went left, toward my house, and the big car behind me turned right, toward town. That was the end of Tyler Hennessy, I thought, unless I found that earring. As I drove, my mind went to other things that were more important than the new Woodsmen player.

After all, life wasn’t only football. Just mostly.